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102 IRELAND

phenomenon which has no parallel except in Prague,
A great deal must depend on the future of Trinity
College, to which no Irishman can be indifferent, for
it is the most splendid, the most distinguished, and
the most distinctive institution in the country.

Cast in an English mould, it resembled Oxford and
Cambridge and differed from them, in the same way
that Anglo-Irish life resembled and differed from
that of English society. Its roots were not far back
in the past; no trace of the mediaeval is in its buildings
or its traditions: it had its beginnings in the years
when the Authorised Version of the English Bible
was in the making; but it scarcely stands out to the
imagination till the defeat of James II had decided
that for two centuries the Protestant middle nation
should be masters in Ireland, Yet before the Battle
of the Boyne, Swift had passed through its lecture-
halls, and no man was destined to set his imprint so
powerfully on the Anglo-Irish mind. He more than
any other taught the colony to think of itself as a
nation; and Trinity College became that nationjs
University, . Grattan and Flood, Fitzgibbon, Lord
Clare and Castlereagh, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and
the Emmets, all got their first training there : these,
rather than the great men who went out into the
wide English-speaking world, Burke, Goldsmith,
Sheridan, Berkeley, represent the nation of that
time, After the Union, the Irish Parliament for
which the University trained them ceased to exist ;
but the University remained, and gained a new im-
portance as at least one surviving centre of distinctively
Irish culture. Like Oxford and Cambridge, it had the
semi-monastic character of a body of men students
and their teachers living together under a certain
discipline within collegiate walls, But unlike them, it
was in the centre of a great city: the University was
only an element in the town, not its central existence :
and inevitably a very much larger population of the
students resided in their own homes and inevitably